Review: The Mirror World of Melody Black

By Gavin Extence (Harvill Sacker)

Abby and Beck live next door to Simon, whose London flat is a mirror of theirs.

But the young couple barely know their middle-aged neighbour, confining their relationship to polite greetings in the hall. Then one night Abby pops in to see if she can borrow a tin of tomatoes for pasta sauce.

The door of Simon’s flat is open, and she can hear the TV turned up loud. She hesitates, then walks into the living room where Simon is in an armchair. She stops abruptly, immediately aware of a feeling of absence, of “the certainty that I was the only person in that flat. I was a person, and Simon was a body”.

Startled, Abby helps herself to one of Simon’s Marlboros – Beck hates her smoking in their flat. After another half cigarette she phones the police and then goes home, taking the tomatoes with her. She and Beck still have to eat, after all.

Abby is a freelance journalist with an appointment to interview one of Britain’s top poets the next day. The pair do not hit it off initially, but after some difficulty Abby writes a two-part piece about the poet and about herself and Beck and Simon, which is published in the Observer.

Abby is delighted with the exposure and the money, although Beck is a little less charmed. But they get over his grumpiness by going out clubbing all night, and taking a little something to keep them going. What goes up, of course, comes down, and Abby plummets. It turns out she hasn’t been taking her lithium and life becomes a rollercoaster, with Beck and her family bewildered witnesses.

Eventually she spins out of control, and with the encouragement of her therapist, signs herself into a mental hospital. And that’s where she meets Melody Black, a trainee nail technician.

Melody repeats a theory held by another patient about parallel worlds, as explained in Doctor Who. All the nuts in the ward, says Melody, are living in mirror worlds, having fallen through portals. And as they go through the portal, so their double goes the other way, into their lives. It all makes a bizarre kind of sense to Abby.

“It was hard to shake the feeling that if I hadn’t entered Simon’s flat that evening, if I’d turned and taken the mirror path back to my normal Wednesday night, then… I wouldn’t be staring at the peeling paintwork in the local mental health ward.”

Abby is getting better, in tiny increments – and then she and Melody discover the truth about each other.

In an author’s note Gavin Extence, who wrote the astonishing The World versus Alex Woods – about friendship and assisted suicide – talks of his own struggle with mania, and how his fear, as he became more and more brilliantly manic, like Abby, was that if he told anyone they would want to make it stop, and he wasn’t going to allow that.

He hopes, he says, that in this book he has written something truthful.

This is a moving novel, sometimes funny and wacky, sometimes tragic, and usually interesting – a visit to the holy island of Lindisfarne is now on my bucket list.